Meredith Smith

Bio

Meredith Smith is an American artist from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. She received a Bachelor of Arts from Humboldt State University (HSU) in 2016 and did a year there in the Extended Education Honors Program in 2017. Smith is currently finishing up an Artist Residency at Belger Crane Yard Studios in Kansas City, Missouri, before starting an MFA program at the University of Kansas in 2023. 

Smith makes work that explores interpersonal relationships, self-growth, and the complexity of people’s lives and histories. By overlapping layers of imagery in and on her ceramic pieces, Smith portrays the profound capacity of the human form.

 She is the recipient of individual artist grants from the Ingrid Nickelson Trust and the Humboldt Arts Council, a Windgate Fellowship nominee, and a recipient of the President's Purchase Award from HSU. She has worked as a studio assistant in California, Colorado, and New York, including the Sugar Maples Center for the Arts, and as the Ceramics Technician at HSU. Her work is featured in both juried and invitational shows in galleries around the nation. Find her work at meredithesmith.com.

Artist Statement

The heart of my work is people and what it means to be human. I want to convey everything we experience in our bodies: feelings of being ugly, beautiful, insecure, confident, anxious, meaningless, unique, and alive. By drawing and forming the human body, I can articulate how a feeling long held in your heart can suddenly show up in the curling of your toes. How restless hands always find something to do. How the negative space between two grown siblings yearns for closure. Like people, my work has many layers. Stitched lines, warm tones, figurative sketches, poetry, and gold lines are often woven onto one another to reflect the complexity of our identities. By exploring the disarming power of going further into our tender layers, I struggle with what it is to be a human and arrive at something that illustrates the profound capacity of the human form.